Small and mighty snippets from some of our favorite health and wellness podcast episodes.
Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show
Episode: (#484) Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify — Habits, Systems and Mental Models for Top Performance
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Full Episode Transcript
Date: December 3, 2020
There was a time when Daniel let his health fall by the wayside and he weighed 40 or 50 pounds more than he does today. What helped him turn things around and get back to a more ideal weight? [30:09]
Daniel Ek talks about how he really needed to change his habits to create sustainable lifestyle change. He made simple small changes like not having milk with his coffee and taking the stairs vs. elevator. These small changes made him more sustainable, gave him more energy and allowed him to be better at all things in life.
I love this because it speaks to what we believe in here at DayJ. In order to create sustainable lifestyle change you you do not need to change your life overnight. Small changes over time create healthy habits, which create a healthy lifestyle. One step at a time, one day at a time.
Daniel Ek:
Yeah. Honestly, it was easy and it was hard in that inherently, I was trying to do things in the past. And actually, like many people, I was successful for a period of time. And then I kind of went back to my old ways and then I started eating poorly again, not sleeping well enough, stressing more, et cetera. And then quickly, weight gain followed. And where it kind of clicked and changes, I realized that I needed to actually change my life and change my habits. And the only way to do that would to do it sustainably with things that I actually enjoyed doing.
Podcast: The Doctor’s Farmacy
Episode: (#164) The Secret To Losing Weight And Feeling Great
Listen on Spotify
Date: March 31, 2021
In this episode food as medicine, functional medicine expert Dr. Mark Hyman talks to Dr. Rangan Chatterjee about his new book Feel Great, Lose Weight. One of the most powerful concepts that he emphasizes on the first page of the book is the idea that people tend to blame themselves for not being successful trying a certain diet instead of blaming the diet.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:
That’s the funny thing about the diet industry, Mark, it’s the only industry where we don’t blame the diet we’re following, we blame ourselves. We feel like we’re worthless which speaks to what you said before which is why I think the first paragraph in the book says it’s not your fault. Really try and understand that. Hey, you know what? This is not your fault.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
By the way, the message that we all hear which is losing weight is about eating less and exercising more implicit in that statement is that it’s your fault. If you can’t control your hunger and you can’t get your lazy butt off the couch, it’s your fault. That is the biggest propaganda that’s been put on our population that undermines people’s self-worth, like you’re saying, and undermines your ability to actually understand how their body works and lose weight in a way that is integrity with their natural biological systems which they’re not doing.
The two also mentioned a few interesting data points that show how sleep and stress impact our eating.
Stress and eating - The research suggests that about 80% of us change our eating behavior in response to stress, 45% or so will eat more, 35% or so will eat less. That’s almost half the population, eating more in response to stress. If that’s you or me, if we’re eating more in response to stress and we’re putting our weights, do we need a new diet book or do we need better strategies managing stress?
Lack of sleep and how it effects eating - A lot of people are sleep deprived at the moment. A lot of people are worried. They’re anxious. We know from the data that if you sleep, let’s say, five and a half hours a night compared to eight hours, you’re going to eat on average 22% more calories the following days. Five days of not sleeping well, you may eat a whole extra days’ worth of calories just from not sleeping well.
I’m sure your audience may be familiar with this but what happens when you don’t sleep well. Well, ghrelin, your hunger hormone, goes up so you’re always feeling hungry. Your satiety hormones go down so you never feel full. You’re more emotionally reactive in your brain, you find it harder to say no to temptation.